Despite the risks, Carla Power took her kids to post-revolutionary Cairo, where she'd lived as a child. Together, they witnessed history--Egypt's, and her own.

You're not serious," said a man I'd just met. "You're not taking your children to Egypt." He goggled at me as though I'd suggested lightly toasting my daughters over an open flame. He was an old Egypt hand who knew and loved the country well, he said. But he'd recently been robbed in a leafy Cairo neighborhood, and blamed post-revolution chaos rather than sheer bad luck. He continued, reciting facts I already knew about the fallout from Egypt's 2011 revolution: the martial law, the tensions around the elections, the uncertainties about jobs. "Call your travel agent," he urged. "Cancel."

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I didn't sleep much that night. Was it crazy to drag my two girls, Julia, 10, and Nic, 8, to a country trying to settle itself after a seismic upheaval? Egyptian parents couldn't choose whether or not to keep their kids in an uncertain situation, but I could. Like so many calculations--about whether the big kids' slide is too high, or the teen too freshly licensed to get the Toyota keys--it drove to the heart of motherhood itself. How do you urge your children out to experience the world while protecting them from its dangers?

In the 1970s, my parents--professors and passionate travelers--took my brother and me everywhere. We witnessed a coup in Afghanistan and watched Himalayan villagers ritually sacrifice animals. These weren't particularly easy experiences, but formative ones seldom are. When I grew up I became a journalist, a job that required me to go to strange places. Doing my taxes, driving on the highway--those things scare me. Travel never has.

The year I was 12, we lived in a suburb of Cairo, where our life was a braid of the exotic and the standard-issue American childhood. We waited for the school bus beside the Nile, and dug for mummy beads at the pyramids. We rode bikes to the local American school, which with its cheerleaders and pool felt like a corner of Southern California. The 1970s were simpler times: When I returned to Cairo in 1995, I went back to my old school for a visit, only to find a high wall around it flanked with armed guards.

Sixteen years later, as I watched news footage of Cairo's protesting crowds with my girls, I longed to take them there, to show them that these were real events, rocking real people's lives. I wanted Julia and Nic to look up from their squabbles over the iPad and visit a place whose citizens were risking everything for a better future.

By morning, I'd decided--we would go. I reminded myself of what I'd learned on reporting trips to Karachi and Kabul: News headlines can make entire countries seem like war zones; in truth, the tensions are often confined to tiny areas. My girls and I would skip Tahrir Square, the heart of post-revolutionary fervor in the city, and return to our hotel by dusk. We'd be tourists, not travelers.

We were in a cab, approaching the pyramids, when a pockmarked, unsmiling man waved us down and jumped in the front seat. He craned around and posed a question as old as the sphinx: "You need a guide?"

"No," I glared. "Please get out."

Now it was a declaration: "You need a guide."

"No. Now please get out."

Cue for a tirade--as Nic and Julia shrank into my sides--on why I really, really needed a guide. "Stop the car!" I snapped. "Everybody out!"

I'd known we'd get the hard sell at the pyramids. Egyptians are wonderfully hospitable, but at touristic hot spots, the welcome can morph into hassle. I remembered my 12-year-old self feeling frightened when, in the deeper recesses of Egyptian bazaars, crowds of kids would form around me, friendly but persistent. My parents would make light of it: "It's like being a movie star, Carla!" Now my kids were surrounded too, by men asking them if they wanted a camel ride, a guide, some postcards.

I paid the driver and we trotted to the gates of the pyramid complex, where more wannabe guides crowded around a refreshment stand. When we stopped to buy water, I brushed against a glass Coke bottle, which shattered. At the sound of splintering glass, everybody jumped. A second of silence, then relief. "You have bomb?" grinned one man. "I bet you have bomb." Everyone laughed except the girls, who tugged at me to move on. I recalled that sensation, too--the pull at my father's sleeve, the desire to leave a too-crowded square or a too-strong smell.

The Cairo we found was in some ways the same one I remembered: lovers holding hands on bridges at sunset, restaurant boats moored on the banks of the Nile, garlanded in lights. Less romantic, but thrilling to me, were photos of protestors, their faces painted in the red, white, and black of the Egyptian flag, splashed on signboards and postcards. The walls bloomed with slogans--Liberta!--and murals of prisoners breaking their chains. On one wall, a '50s housewife smiled sweetly next to a television and the slogan: "We're watching you back."

"How many people died in the revolution?" Nic asked one morning as we sat in traffic. "Oh, not that many," I said thoughtlessly, hardened by an adult's knowledge of the last century's wars. "Maybe a few hundred. A thousand, at most."

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"But that's a lot!" said Nic, shocked. And as our taxi crept around the outskirts of Tahrir Square, I felt a twinge of discomfort at our tourist jaunt to a country where people were still being imprisoned for speaking out. On TV, the local news covered the trial of ex-president Mubarak, and my kids watched, wide-eyed, as the former dictator, suffering from cancer, was wheeled into the courtroom. But they grew tired of my harping on about the revolution. "Why do you always ask that?" grumbled Nic after I'd quizzed the umpteenth taxi driver about the current situation. "I'm a journalist, sweetie," I answered. "We ask questions."

Journalists might, but the kids often didn't. Julia never seemed to notice that most women were wearing hijab, or headscarves. She reveled in having to put one on when we visited a ninth-century mosque, and tore around the courtyard with it streaming behind her. I resisted the urge to launch into a lecture over the politics of the veil. The object of our trip, I was realizing, was to let my girls connect with Egypt in their own ways, not mine. Later, we stopped for glasses of hibiscus tea at Fishawy's, a café with smoky mirrors in the main bazaar, where patrons nurse their shisha pipes. As a student in my 20s, I'd come to Fishawy's to study, sometimes reading there until midnight. The café has operated since 1773, I told the girls: "It's been open the entire time the United States has been a country." Julia brightened: "Day... and night... and day... " Nic joined in: "And day... and night."

The hugeness of Egyptian history was daunting, so my daughters needed child-friendly toeholds in it. We took on the sphinx by comparing the size of his paws to our apartment block. Downtown, they whooped with recognition when they saw a poster ripping off the movie Bridesmaids, with Egyptian actresses leaning against the wall in pink dresses, just like the American original.

We never made it to see my childhood apartment, or my old school; none of us relished a long ride in the car just to look at a building. I didn't mind much, because the girls were too busy navigating their own Cairo. One monument was the English bookshop near our hotel. We spent hours there, with Julia planted in the tween fiction section and Nic poring over Tintin books. "Just 10 more minutes, Mom," pleaded Julia. What a waste, I caught myself thinking. You drag your kids to Cairo so they can witness history--Egypt's, or your own--only to have them bury themselves in The Princess Diaries. But then I thought back to my own childhood, of feeling lost in strange places. I remembered the thrill of finding an ABBA album in a shop near our apartment. Egypt may be far away from our home in Missouri, I thought then. But if you're willing to look, the world is a very small place. My daughters, cross-legged on the bookstore floor, already seemed to know that.